Consume

August 27, 2010, 17:16 UTC by chris
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The new C’est la Mort, Empty Words Fill Lonely Spaces, is out. Three Imaginary Girls posted a review that contains words like “masterful”, “immaculate”, “ethereal”, and “angst”. Go buy it.

The other new C’est la Mort, In the Soft Focus Light of I Love You, is a remix disc featuring, among acts you’ve actually heard of like Jupe Jupe, “Among the Ruins (Doll Factory Mix)”. Go buy it.

A Sepiachord Passport, mastered by Chris from Doll Factory (aka “me”), comes out October 12 on Projekt Records. Wait, then go buy it.

The CIJ Jaguar Special HH has some new (OK, old, one is from around 1995 and the others are from around 1965, but still…) friends to keep it company, courtesy of extra summer-season moonlighting gig money from running live sound for Concerts in the Parks and various festivals:

…and thanks to an illustrious silent benefactor, inventor, acoustician, patron of the arts, and all-around audiovisual renaissance man, we’ve finally moved up to an Intel dual-dual-core Mac Pro with UAD-2, 16 gigs of RAM, and an embarrassment of terabytes of hard drives (two internal 2 TB drives, two internal 1.5 TB drives, an external 1TB, and a four-bay Drobo about to be filled with the rest of the hard drives stacked up in the corner…)

And now (drumroll please), back (once more) to actually working on music, instead of taking routers and soldering irons to funky Japanese guitars and poking at circuit boards with Phillips-head screwdrivers…stay tuned…

Weekend Update

June 21, 2010, 16:37 UTC by chris
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Another track in the can. 1 or 2 more and we’re considering posting a free EP while we finish up the rest of the album. http://j.mp/9DC39t

Should probably take the night off to try and wrap up work on the upcoming Sepiachord Passport compilation CD before getting back to our own material, though.

Also, new (to me) CIJ Fender Jaguar HH guitar and a laser-engraved neckplate for it arrived in the mail. Yeah, sure, every snotnosed kid within two hours of a Guitar Center has probably got one of the new imported-to-Fender-USA-dealers versions by now, but whatever. It’s pretty, and it sounds and plays great, and it’s one of the older 1994-95 versions from before they were sold Stateside. Earvana compensated nut upgrade and copper shielding tape and 12″ by 12″ copper-tape sheet are in the mail (as other online reviewers have noted, the humbuckers do a fine job of living up to their namesake, but the inadequately shielded internal wiring does not, which is not so cool when you’re sitting in a small room surrounded in every direction by computers and audio gear with big transformers). New strings, polish the frets, a little oil on the fretboard, a little tweak to the truss rod (understandable after a FedEx trek from Texas to the currently lame “Juneuary” Seattle weather), redo the intonation, and we’ll be golden. Or rather, black and chrome. Because “gold hardware” on any music equipment that’s not a Steinway or Bösendorfer is almost as stuffy and lame as sunburst finishes and “tortoise shell” pickguards.

I guess I just like gear to look vaguely machine-like and mysterious – like a piece of electrical equipment, and not so much like a piece of mobile-home furniture meant to hold recipe-card meatloaf and tater tot casseroles. “Airline” and “Danelectro” and “Vox Phantom” style guitars excepted, of course.

Maybe that’s just me.

Now if only Earvana and GraphTech would get together some sort of cross-licensing arrangement and offer the Earvana design nuts, but made out of the GraphTech Teflon-impregnated compound stuff, I’d be a seriously happy camper.

(White noise in a white room…)

June 7, 2010, 14:31 UTC by chris
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Mix revision number don’twannatalkaboutit in the can. Overdubs on the next song, need to pick up the pace on the rest of the tracks so we don’t end up spilling into 2011 and almost certain spontaneous studio seppuku. Live sound for someone else’s band over the weekend. Subwoofers, compact line arrays, and amp racks are heavy – even when they have wheels – when you have to push them a block and a half uphill both ways. Calves still a bit sore from that. More work on the next song tonight, mastering session for the next Sepiachord comp tomorrow, back to work on next song the rest of the week. Trying to avoid coveting a black-n-chrome Jaguar HH, Korg Monotron, Moog Voyager, and rumored upcoming Oberheim Two-Voice reissue. (I hear some talk of guns and butter…) 90% sure we’re gonna give an outside party a go at the whole mastering thing this time around for the upcoming Doll Factory tracks; as mastering other people gets easier and easier, mastering ourselves gets more difficult. Or at least less fun. We’ve done the fun part, now how about you make it loud. Onwards. (Hearing talk of joy in labour…)

One C’est la Mort remix down…

April 19, 2010, 16:45 UTC by chris
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…a dozen-odd Doll Factory™ tracks to go. THE NEW BUSY™ make PANCAKES™ into EXOTIC ANIMAL SHAPES™.

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Recording Session: Schedule it Like the Pros!

March 4, 2010, 16:08 UTC by chris
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Let’s get random, zagga, zagga, zagga, yo…

February 8, 2010, 15:39 UTC by chris
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That N.A.S.A. song with David Byrne and a bunch of MCs makes me happier than it has any right to, in a tropical-flavored World Destruction kinda way. Only, more ‘time and space’ and less ‘Reagan and Thatcher’, of course.

Fun was had at the Editors show at the Showbox last Friday. Being on the guest list is fun, even when it’s because you won a record store contest just like anyone else, and not because you’re in some band or something. Music critics that still insist on rehashing that “hrrrgh! Sounds just like Ian Curtis!” thing are just being lame and losing the plot at this point. For the record, I did not hear anything that sounded like Ian Curtis all evening. While their three full-lengths to date are pretty divergent from each other, it seems that’s more due to production style than the songs themselves; the ‘catalog’ of songs sounds totally cohesive – to the point of struggling to remember which songs are from which album – the way they do them live. The show reaffirmed my “they’re one of those bands that makes more sense after you see them live” theory about ‘em. Ran in to Kim and Geoff from C’est La Mort, who I don’t think had seen Garrick since he moved back to town.

Good arranging / editing / get-a-second-opinion-on-what-to-do-with-those-empty-four-and-eight-bar-transition-sections session on P.o.E. on Thursday. Hubristically thought we’d wrap up the song, but instead ended up finding out that there’s more work to be done than we thought… (“The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.” “That’s us, dude!”). But isn’t that always the way with such things?

Last time I checked, I was still an American, but I still do not understand your “American football”. Even the commercials aren’t amusing anymore, but the thing apparently had the highest ratings in over 20 years, so it’s probably only a matter of time before we’re watering our crops with Brawndo.

Please remember to mention me / in tapes you leave behind…

January 11, 2010, 18:33 UTC by chris
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The ‘holiday season’ officially over, it’s time to put away the decorations (a week or two late), turn the ‘guest room’ back into the ‘home studio’, put the extra dishes back in the attic, test out the latest additions to the microphone locker (sort-of vintage-esque-ish C414B-ULS and new el-cheapo CAD ribbon mic), do some tests and perhaps modifications (at least bypass caps and maybe experiment with resistors to make the outputs ’see’ the specified 600-ohm output, while waiting for the ‘could replace every component in the signal path if need be’ order to show up from Mouser) on a pair of cool-sounding-transformers but that-noise-floor-just-can’t-be-within-spec mic preamps, dust and vacuum, and get back to work on some actual music, finally.

Saw friend Jorge’s Americana / alt-country / honky-tonk band Ruby Dee and the Snakehandlers over New Years’ weekend. Fun was had.

Holding down the fort in “the 206″ while most folks I know are heading down to NAMM. Can’t say I’m sad about it.

Still haven’t had time to get out to see Avatar (Pocahontas Dances With FernGully in Space), Sherlock Holmes (plus exploding fireballs and glistening pectoral muscles, minus pipe-smoking and deerstalker hats), or The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (aka thin and predictable plot but I’ll see it anyway for the visuals), hoping “Inception” will live up to its own previews once that’s out.

…and managed to sneak in some time for a few quick electric violin overdubs, re-recorded a better take of a was-good-but-a-little-too-peaky-sounding-on-that-one-chord guitar track (I was going for a ‘cutting’ Telecaster / LP-junior / AC30 / Twin tone, but it ended up going way too far to the “icepick to the temples” end of the continuum – lesson learned…), and some string-machine-with-phaser-cause-the-Gary-Numan-kick-still-isn’t-letting-up parts on that song we’re working on that for the life of me I can’t remember the name of right now, because the title isn’t in the lyrics (unless it is), which is making me feel, temporarily at least, like a doddering old fool.

The Sepiachord Companion

November 24, 2009, 18:22 UTC by chris
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The Sepiachord Companion, a new compilation CD featuring tracks from Voltaire, Jill Tracy, Unwoman, One Beer Prophet, Vermillion Lies, and “much, much more” is now shipping from Devil’s Ruin Records.

Featuring mastering by me, and the debut appearance in a commercially-released album’s liner notes for our new assistant engineer and red-book CD authoring consultant (pictured at right operating our custom-modified, all-discrete, Class A mastering console by Baby LeapFrog).

Find out more information about The Sepiachord Companiaon and order a copy at www.sepiachord.com.